Incurable Blackness: Criminal Disenfranchisement, Mental Disability, and the White Citizen

Abstract

<p>The Maryland State Constitution states that its General Assembly may, "regulate or prohibit the right to vote of a person convicted of infamous or other serious crime or under care or guardianship for mental disability." In a single sentence, the link between criminality and mental disability is invoked in order to draw an internal boundary around those who can take part in the project of representative government. Through a close reading of one particular moment in the history of Maryland's disenfranchisement provisions, I show how these restrictions could buttress prevailing racial hierarchies. Delegates to Maryland's nineteenth century constitutional conventions explicitly understood disenfranchisement as a practice that managed the boundaries of full citizenship through the courts' power to determine criminal guilt and mental competence. In defining "exceptions" to the franchise, the delegates were additionally shoring up the increasingly unstable conception of whiteness. The figure of the "free negro" was persistently invoked to do this work, marked through criminality and insanity as civically disabled in order to both reduce the threat that s/he posed to the standing of white workers and to shore up the purity of whiteness itself as innocent, able, and fit to rule. In so far as disenfranchisement is an instrument of racial oppression, it continues to operate racially not just in spite of color-blind liberalism, but also precisely through its ability to disarm claims of racial animus. The norms that drove the adoption of disenfranchisement in the nineteenth century continue to ground these exclusions to the vote, meaning that the ideal figure of the American citizen continues to be compulsorily white, male, heterosexual, and able-bodied. Ending this legacy of social and political hierarchization requires that we remove disenfranchisement provisions, but also move beyond the logic of inclusion, divesting the vote as a location that finalizes, essentializes, and fixes the boundaries of the polity.</p>

Exploring how prison-based drug rehabilitation programming shapes racial disparities in substance use disorder recovery

“…Critical Disability Studies (CDS) interrogate social constructions of ability, impairment, and normalcy (Vehmas and Watson, 2014). The findings offered above broaden the discussion of how (dis)ability and race are conflated (Block et al, 2001;Dilts, 2012), and the extent to which ableism and intersections of marginality disproportionately affect women, queer, poor, and nonwhite individuals, by including the experiences of formerly incarcerated individuals.…”

Disability and White Supremacy

“…50 Writing specifically about US state laws concerning guardianship, political theorist Andrew Dilts argues that "there is a deeper and more prevalent connection between race and disability [than mere assumptions about 'ability' tacked to each], and it has in part to do with the formation and maintenance of racial categories marked expressly through mental disability and criminality." 51 Put more provocatively, if the legal, social, and political framework set up via white settler colonialist institutions has long understood race and disability intersectionally, perhaps scholars should more carefully attend to doing the same.…”

Beyond impairment: Recent histories of early American disability

“…For disability and slavery in antebellum America, also see Boster (, ), Barclay (, ), Forret (), Ralph (), and Dilts ().…”